She quickly gathers that Evelyn is both John’s partner-in-crime and an abused woman longing to live with children she had with another man.
Hounds of love true story crack#
Vicki-instinctual, undisciplined, and intelligent-is just the person to crack Evelyn’s brittle compliance. Breakfast for the man of the house means two slices of toast placed precisely next to each other, with an egg cup on the side. The Whites stack their shoes neatly by the door and put on slippers. Evelyn’s matter-of-factness as she handles a box of sex toys/rape aids or mops blood off the floor is as petrifying as John’s satisfied expression when he packs a corpse into his car trunk, then buries it in a pine forest. Vicki finds herself chained to the guest bed as part of a brutal ritual that we know they play out repeatedly.
Hounds of love true story movie#
What’s scary in this movie is how the Whites make atrocity routine. The Whites’ amiable older-neighbor act, and the prospect of buying a reefer for a “tenner” is enough to get Vicki into their car their practiced affability as a couple and Evelyn’s sisterly solicitude ease Vicki into the house, where wine and knockout pills do the rest. Outer suburbia is where Vicki falls prey to Evelyn and John White when she sneaks out a window after her mother has grounded her. We soon learn that her parents have separated, and her mother, seeking to establish a life apart from her well-heeled surgeon husband, has moved to what Young calls “outer suburbia”-a great phrase for “the other side of the tracks” in a town where the one sign of escape is the sight of jets flying up and away. As they make quick work of her, Johnson introduces us to their next target, Vicki, as she rewards her boyfriend with a make-out session for doing some homework for her. Were humans meant to live in this environment? The skyrocketing temperature persuades the first victim we see to accept a ride home in the Whites’ car. He also conveys an oppressive aura of heat beating down from the sun and radiating up from the ground. Young starts his film with voyeuristic close-ups of healthy young female bodies straining against school uniforms on a volleyball court.
Hounds of Love is creepy from the get-go. Their horrors emerge from characters struggling to construct artificial lifestyles on resistant natural turf. Writer-director Young, in his filmmaker’s statement for his debut feature Hounds of Love, says he set out to create from the beginning “a perverse unease in what we would usually associate as a safe, suburban environment.” In Wakefield, the antihero/narrator sees the “disconnects” of his botched trip back to his commuter town as part of “the trajectory of a collapsing civilization.” In these movies, calamity and distress do not come from the usual clichés of wicked developers building malls on top of graveyards or yuppies renovating haunted homes. (It’s fitting and amusing to consider that some members of Swicord’s crew also worked on The Revenant.)Īlthough far different in tone, mood, and genre, these two instantly memorable films share peculiar qualities of suburban obsession, on the part of the characters and the filmmakers. Wakefield is both a roller-coaster psychic study of a man in search of his own character and a wicked riff on a wilderness adventure, as Wakefield (Bryan Cranston) forages his town’s well-stocked garbage cans for garb and grub and even logs time in the local nature preserve. Hounds of Love-a genuinely nightmarish, nerve-wrackingly observant movie-focuses on the couple’s latest kidnap victim, 17-year-old Vicki Maloney (Ashleigh Cummings), who susses out the rifts in the lethal co-dependency of John and Evelyn White (Stephen Curry and Emma Booth). Doctorow’s 2008 short story.) He chooses to live secretly in the neglected attic of his carriage-house garage, where he observes his wife and twin daughters from a distance, often through binoculars. (Swicord’s deft and daring script derives from E.L.
Hounds of love true story serial#
(The couple is based primarily on serial killers David and Catherine Birnie.) In Robin Swicord’s pungent contemporary fable Wakefield, a successful corporate lawyer in suburban New York comes home late from work because of a power outage, then delays entering his house indefinitely.
In Ben Young’s bristling true-crime horror film Hounds of Love, an unassuming couple in 1987 suburban Perth, Western Australia, put on a hip, friendly manner to lure high-school girls into their modest ranch-style home, where they drug, rape, and kill them.